By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
March 10, 2004
It’s rather obvious Hamilton Leithauser has a cold. Yes, he often sounds hoarse when he’s fronting the hot New York band the Walkmen. But this afternoon, Leithauser is particularly wheezy and congested.
Not that this will prevent his band from going on with the show.
“We all got sick from another band we were touring with once and were really sick,” says Leithauser, phoning from New York. “But then [guitarist] Paul [Maroon] put it into perspective. He said, ‘There are [artists] like Phil Collins and Celine Dion that cancel shows and others that don’t.’ We don’t.”
Laughing, he adds, “I’m sure that in like five years, I won’t be able to talk at all. I’m already going deaf. I’m certain I have tinnitus already ’cause if I’m in a room and someone’s talking to me, it all becomes a wash. I’m always talking overly loud with people shushing me to be quiet.”
Except when he’s on stage. As the frontman for the five-man Walkmen, who are touring to support their recently released album “Bows and Arrows,” Leithauser and his group have made a name for themselves based on their explosive live shows.
The band has so much energy the musicians performed three shows at New York’s Knitting Factory — on the same night.
“We weren’t totally crazy,” he says. “We waited till the end of a really long tour, ’cause I tend to blow out my voice after the first couple shows but then I gradually build up stamina with each show afterwards. We thought it would be fun.”
And was it?
“It was,” he says. “But it was the first and last time. We’ll never do it again. At the end, we collapsed.”
Though Leithauser’s own musical reference points are Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen, his band could be the diluted punk love child of the Strokes and Radiohead. All jangly guitars and petulant lyrics (“The Rat” is a particularly catchy song at the expense of an unscrupulous lover), the Walkmen haven’t traded melody for frenetics.
Leithauser and his bandmates are amused when they read reviews about their band because of the way they sometimes are perceived.
“From the beginning, people were writing that we were well hyped,” he says. “I’m not kidding. At the first show we ever played, where there was nobody there and certainly nobody who cared, we had that. I think they mean it in a good way, but it’s one of those key phrases where you’re not really sure whether you should be flattered or not by it.”
Like the rest of the group, Leithauser hails from Washington, D.C. They attended school together and played in a variety of bands that shared a common trait — they were all really loud. Until now, the group was most famous for having three former members of Jonathan Fire*Eater in its midst.
“We always felt that whatever we were doing was the right time to be doing it,” he says. “We felt that back in high school. No one else probably did, but I thought we were great.”
For this leg of the tour, which is scheduled through the beginning of May and likely to be extended, Leithauser says he will concentrate on not getting car sick.
“I have to see straight ahead or I get sick,” he says, laughing. “Reading [in the van] used to make me sick as well but I have to work through that because otherwise you just get so bored. It’s unfortunate we can’t spend more time writing and being creative on the road because there is so much time just doing nothing, but it’s impossible.”
